Ah! There was Jack still standing against the mast, but now loudly stamping on the deck to attract his partner’s attention. He did not look back, but continued to stare away over the starboard bow, as though he knew that once he shifted the direction of his gaze the object would be lost to him. Joe altered course in accordance with the orders given by Wilton’s outstretched arm, his feet taking the place of his hands on the wheel-spokes.
Presently he came to see ahead a line of suds, thin and broken. As he well knew, it was the division line between a current setting landward and one making seaward, a dividing line forming a no-man’s-land on which floated the chalky backs of cuttlefish, the bodies of dead crabs, and other offal of the sea.
Then Joe saw that which was exciting his partner. It was reflecting the sunlight, winking as the water moved its angle with the sun. Joe pushed the clutch into neutral, and the Marlin lost speed and glided towards the sun-reflector. Wilton shouted:
“It’s a thermos-flask!”
He raced aft to leap down into the cockpit, where he crouched over the gunwale whilst Joe expertly “edged” the craft alongside the flasks. With his booted feet hooked about the side rail of the starboard angler’s chair, Wilton leaned far out and down to snatch from the sea this piece of flotsam. Joe helped him inboard, and together they regarded the flask.
The cap cup was screwed on tightly and yet was not rusted on. There was no rust on the screw of the flask, which was new and obviously had not long been in the water. The cork was firmly pushed into the glass receptacle, and on being pulled free permitted Wilton to pour a little of the contents out on to a hand palm. It was tea, and when he tasted it, he said, looking at Joe:
“Might have been brewed this morning. Hullo, what’s this?”
On the bottom of the flask had been scratched two letters. The scratching was still bright. Only recently had it been done.
“Who-in-’ell’s B.H.?” demanded Joe. “Them’s someone’s initials.
“Yes. B.H. Can’t be Hooper of the Lily. His are M.H.”
“No. And B.H. don’t stand for Ericson, or for Spinks, or for Garroway, Spinks’s mate. She couldn’t have come from the Do-me.”
There was vast disappointment in Joe’s voice. He turned back to the wheel, put in the gear, climbed to his petrol drum and resumed his crouching attitude above the shelter roof. It was as though he blamed Wilton.
Wilton placed the “find” in his lunch basket in the cabin, and resumed his place at the mast. Slowly the Marlin was sent on her way parallel with the winding line of suds. When at the end of the suds line, the craft continued her apparently aimless wandering about the sea. During the next hour Wilton retrieved a caseboard, which, however, had small shell fish adhering to it, proving that it had been in the water for some considerable time, and a butter-box with similar evidence.
Nothing was seen or retrieved of vital importance to the fate of the Do-me; and the flask was not likely to have any bearing on it, either.
Time passed quite unnoticed by the searchers until the sun, having travelled down the sky’s flawless bowl, rested for a moment on the horizon and then was swallowed by the sea. Still the Marlin crawled along the invisible road, and still the two men maintained their stations and their attitudes. Only when increasing dusk decreased visibility to a few yards did Jack Wilton come aft, to say:
“We’ll go home and come out again tomorrow.”
“All right! We can start from Swordfish Reef tomorrow,” Joe agreed. “If we don’t find anything tomorrow, then the Do-me’s still afloat somewhere.”
It was close to midnight when the Marlin approached the now invisible bar, kicked herself over the tumbling water into the channel, and crept along the river to the jetty.
Three men stood on the jetty, evidently waiting for them.
“Any luck, Jack?” inquired Mr Blade.
“No. Don’t think so, anyway.”
“Don’t think so!” echoed a man whose dark shape against the starry sky informed the seaman that he was a stranger.
“What ’ave you got to do with it, any’ow?” demanded Joe, climbing to the jetty with a mooring-rope.
“This is Detective-Sergeant Allen,” said Constable Telfer.
“Coo!” snorted Joe, as though Detective-Sergeant Allen had no moral or legal right to breathe.
Wilton gained the jetty, to say to the waiting three:
“We’ve seen nothing of the Do-me—only that aeroplane. We’ve been looking for wreckage, flotsam, where Joe reckons flotsam from off the Do-me ought to be if she had sunk. We found nothing belonging to her. All we found was a new thermos-flask. Here it is. On the bottom is scratched the initials B.H.”
“Ah!” murmured Allen with immense satisfaction. “B.H. stands for Bermagui Hotel. The morning that the Do-me last went to sea, one of the maids at the pub dropped Mr Ericson’s flask and broke it. She filled and gave him one of three flasks bought a couple of days before by the hotel. The barman scratched the initials on all three of ’em.”
Chapter Four
A Clue Among Fish
Before the construction of the Prince’s Highway, Bermagui was an isolated hamlet aroused only at Christmas and at Easter by the small influx of visitors from inland farms and the market town of Cobargo. Even after the opening of the Highway it suffered to some extent through the disadvantage of being seven miles from it at Tilba Tilba. It was His Majesty the Swordfish that “made” Bermagui.
The discovery of swordfish in the waters off the southern coast of New South Wales was due to chance, for their swift-moving dorsal fins when seen by the fishermen were thought to be a species of shark. A fisherman when out for salmon, using a hand line with a feathered hook attached, one afternoon was bringing to his boat a fine fighting salmon which was followed by a huge fish. The big fish came to the surface close to the boat—to reveal not only its dorsal fin but its “sword”.
For some time this was thought to be only a fisherman’s yarn, until Mr Roy Smith determined to test the story, and on 2nd February, 1933, proved its authenticity by capturing with rod and reel a black marlin weighing 262 pounds. Still, doubt remained general that swordfish regularly visited the coast of southern New South Wales, although the fishermen declared that the swift-moving fins had been seen every summer. When Mr Roy Machaelis and Mr W. G. Wallis between them captured nine swordfish in the one day, deep sea anglers the world over began to take notice. The subsequent visit of Mr Zane Grey resulted in Bermagui becoming famous as a centre of big game angling.
When Angler Ericson and his launchmen on the Do-me vanished, Bermagui suffered a slight setback, for it naturally followed that when an unexplained catastrophe overwhelmed a small launch the other launches were considered to be too frail for the open sea, or too likely to be the victims of whales or mermen, or too liable to strike an uncharted reef. Proof of this came quickly in the form of cancelled bookings of the launches and hotel accommodation.
The search for the Do-me achieved nothing but the reclamation of one thermos-flask from the sea.
Detective-Sergeant Allen’s reputation was high, but he was unfortunately a poor sailor. Jack Wilton and Joe took him out to show him the position of the Gladious when Remmings last sighted the Do-me, and the position of the Do-me when she was last sighted, but poor Allen became frightfully sea-sick and unable to maintain any interest. Thereafter he confined his investigating to the land.
One man in Bermagui came to wonder just who and what Mr Ericson had been—and was, if still alive. The secretary of the club followed the intensive and extensive search with